Simple tricks to squeeze more out of your noisy quantum device

Near-term applications of early quantum devices rely on accurate estimates of expectation values to become relevant. Decoherence and gate errors lead to wrong estimates. This problem was, at least in theory, remedied with the advent of quantum error correction. However, the overhead that is needed to implement a fully fault-tolerant gate set with current codes and current devices seems prohibitively large. In turn, steady progress is made in improving the quality of the quantum hardware and we believe that we can build machines in the near term that cannot be emulated by a conventional computer. We discuss simple techniques that increase the quality of short-depth quantum simulations. In light of these advances, it becomes interesting to ask what these noisy devices can be used for. In this talk we will present our advances in the search for quantum algorithms for noisy quantum computers that may be relevant to problems in quantum simulation and quantum machine learning.